UPCOMING EVENTS

21Vianet Group, a leading carrier-neutral Internet data services provider in China, has announced that it has entered into share purchase agreements with Kingsoft, Xiaomi and Temasek.

The three investors will inject a total of $296 million of funding into 21Vianet. Kingsoft agreed to a $172 million investment for a 11.6 percent stake in 21Vianet. Xiaomi invested $50 million into a 3.4 percent stake, while Temasek will invest $74 million for a 13.1 percent share of the company.

Following the deal, 21Vianet will build, operate, maintain and provide technical support for new, state-of-art data centers in China to meet the next-generation cloud infrastructure requirements of Kingsoft and designated third parties. Upon meeting certain conditions, 21Vianet will lease to Kingsoft and partners a minimum of 5,000 cabinets over the next three years.

Lei Jun, board chairman of both KingSoft and Xiaomi, disclosed that Kingsoft is going all-out in cloud services by investing $1 billion in the next three to five years.

He also announced that Xiaomi Cloud now has a storage capacity of 47 petabytes and provides service for almost 68 million users. The service has saved more than 24.1 billion pictures for users as of present, with daily growth for pictures at around 90 million and 1.2 million for video clips.